HomeBlogTrendsHow Many Software Developers Are in the US and the World in 2019?

How Many Software Developers Are in the US and the World in 2019?

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Daxx Team

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May 20, 2019

Trends

2019: How Many Software Developers Are There in the World?

According to Evans Data Corporation, there were 23 million software developers in 2018, this number is expected to reach 26,4 million by the end of 2019 and 27,7 million by 2023.

According to IDC calculations, in 2018 the number of software developers in the world grew to 22,3 million, while in 2014 there were only 18,5 million programmers.

The number of software developers in the world

How Many Software Engineers Are There in the US?

Evans Data Corporation claims there were around 4,4 million software developers in North America in 2016.
According to DataUSA, the number of people employed as software developers, applications & systems software in the US reached 1,36 million in 2017. Don’t Quit Your Day Job gives an estimate pretty close to Evans Data Corporation - 4,2 million as of 2019. This was calculated while trying to figure out how many developers there are across different US states.

The number of software engineers in the US

It’s worth noting that estimated in 2017 the 4,2 million includes technical writers, electrical and hardware engineers, CAD programmers, actuaries, statisticians, economists, mathematicians, and generally anyone who writes or reads code on a daily basis, in addition to software developers. If we only take the “classic” definition of a software developer, we’re actually only looking at around 3,4 million people.

When it comes to the state-by-state breakdown, the highest percentage of programmers are concentrated in the Washington DC area. 6.46 % of workers who live there meet the most extended definition of a developer in this research. Virginia and Maryland followed next, with 4.43 % and 4.41 % respectively.

Top 10 US states with the highest percentage of software developers

In terms of raw numbers, California leads the way with 628 thousand “classic” developers. Texas and New York come in second and third with 325 thousand and 218 thousand respectively.

Top 10 US states with the largest number of software engineers

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How Many Software Engineers Are There in Europe?

According to Stack Overflow, the number of software developers in Europe was reported to stand at 4,7 million in 2016, which in 2018 reached 5,5 million. Germany has the largest number of software developers - around 837K. The UK and France round up the list of top 3 countries with the largest number of software developers reaching 813,5K and 467,5K respectively.

The number of professional software developers in Europe by country

How Many Software Developers Are There in Ukraine?

Ukraine is the 2nd largest talent pool in Eastern Europe with the number of software developers constantly growing. According to the latest update, there are 184,700 IT professionals, this number is expected to reach 200,000 by 2020 and 242,000 by 2025.

The number of software developers in Ukraine

The software developers population is obviously growing and European tech is moving forward extremely fast too. Despite the fact that there are 5,5 million developers in Europe, the European Union countries are still estimated to suffer a shortage of 500,000 software engineers by 2020.

What Are the Most Used Programming Languages? Worldwide Programming Language Statistics

The problem is that methodologies for counting developers specializing in specific languages are even blurrier than the ones used for estimating the total number. To statisticians’ great dismay, most developers have a knowledge of at least two or three languages other than the one specified in their job title.

Still, we’ve found some rough estimates online that you may find useful:

The number of Java developers varies significantly. In 2003, Java developers were totaled between 1,5 and 3 million; in 2007, when Java became open source, this number had risen to 6 million. The Global Developer Population and Demographics Survey, conducted by Evans Data Corporation, reported that the Java developer population was 9 million in 2009 making Java one of the most used programming languages worldwide (source).

According to SlashData, the number of Java developers in the world was 7,1 million as of September 2018 (source).

According to the 2016 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, “JavaScript is the most commonly used programming language on earth. Even Back-end developers are more likely to use it than any other language.” Meanwhile, the most recent data provided by SlashData showed that there were 10,7 million JavaScript software developers in the world in 2018 (source).

There is no exact answer. There was an old study dated back to 2004 which said there were about 6 million .NET developers in the world. Today, according to many guesses there are approximately 7-8 million .NET developers. The majority of them use C#.

As of 2016, the number of mobile app developers in the world was 12 million, including 5,9 million Android developers and 2,8 million iOS developers (source). The number is expected to reach 14 million by 2020.

Offshore Developer Rates Guide

Software Engineer Demographics

All in all, there’s not really a way to check how accurate the above data is. It’s not that we doubt the credibility of the sources we used — it’s the definitions that pose the problem. Data Evans Corporation, for instance, counts everyone who’s actively involved in the creation of software from rank and file coders to team leaders and managers, all the way up to CTOs.
Both Data USA and DQYDJ used data provided by the US Census Bureau but somehow ended up with very different figures. Again, this most likely is the result of differing definitions.

The one thing that we know for sure is that the number of people writing code is only going to grow in the coming years. The BLS predicts that by 2024, the number of jobs for software and app developers will have increased by 12.5% compared to 2014, and the situation won’t be much different in the rest of the world. Meanwhile, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that software developer jobs will increase by 24% between 2016 and 2026. According to Burning Glass Labor Insights, there were more than 227,000 software developer job postings in the second quarter of 2018 in comparison to 176,530 during the same period in 2017. The increase was nearly 51,000.

The number of software developer job postings

Other Interesting Software Developer Statistics

Regular surveys conducted by Evans Data Corporation, DataUSA and Stack Overflow offer plenty of software developer statistics. Below are the ones we consider the most interesting:

According to Evans Data, the median software developer age is 36 (EMEA region — 40, North America — 39, Latin America — 35, APAC region — 34). According to datausa.io, the median software, applications & systems software developer age in the US is 39.8, and male employees are generally 0.507 years younger than female.

29% of developers worldwide, or 6,452,000 in all, were using some form of AI or ML as of 2018 and an additional 5.8 million are expected to start using AI or ML within the next six months.

2 million developers work on IoT apps

4 million developers (26%) use cloud-based development environments.

33% of women stated that the most important driver of their development work lies in their personal curiosity and interest in the technologies they use, whereas this was true of only 22% of men.

Software Development is Not Only About Quantity | 3 Reasons for Considering Ukrainian Tech Talent

Strong Tech Expertise. Ukrainian developers are skilled in a variety of technologies, with Java (26.3%), C#(15.4%), JavaScript(13.8%), PHP (13.1%), and Python (8%) being the most popular programming languages. The most trendy frameworks that the Ukrainian candidates would like to work with are Spring, .NET Core, React.js, Angular, Vue.js, and Symfony.

Mentality. According to our research, Ukrainian developers tend to show high involvement and commitment to their jobs and rely on detailed planning and clear requirements: 82% of them claimed the reason they work in software development lies in their interest in technology, while 48% of Ukrainian developers code in their free time.

Proficiency level. 19% of all software engineers have 7+ years of experience because the young generation is really into software development. Ukrainian freelance engineers take 7th place in the world based on high-performance, quality and efficiency. Nearly 80% of Ukrainian developers possess an intermediate or higher level of English proficiency. Students of CS faculties that start working as trainees in IT companies already have a few years of experience under their belts.

Talk to our experts and start your software development cooperation with motivated software developers from Ukraine.

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Daxx Team

Daxx Team is a team of passionate creative writers, content marketers, designers who vigorously research internet as well as cooperate with developers and Managing Director at Daxx to provide you with the top-notch material about tech, salary trends, development team hiring and management tips as well as up-to-date information about Ukrainian IT outsourcing market.

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